Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 150: LISTENER CALLS: Finding More Family Time

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: When should tasks live on my calendar? [7:24]LISTENER CALLS:- Online presences for novelists  [14:13]- Not getting stuff done outside of work [26:10]- Managing team workload [32:19]- Finding more family time [39:37]- Leveraging career capital early in one’s career [47:48]Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This podcast is sponsored by Chili Sleep. Science tells us that the best way to achieve and maintain consistent deep sleep is by lowering your core body temperature. That temperature-controlled sleep will restore testosterone levels, repair muscles after a hard day work, even improve cognitive function. I don't need, however, science to tell me this because I am a hot sleeper and therefore I know from first, hand experience how much better I feel when I can actually have it be cool when I'm sleeping. This is why I am so excited about chilly sleep. They have luxury mattress pads that are hydro-powered and temperature controlled.

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our exclusive discount and wake up refreshed every day. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Episode 150. I'm joined here in the Deep Work H.Q. My producer Jesse. Jesse, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you doing?

Do you know the reference of Charlie Brown and Lucy in the football? No. So it's a recurring theme in the cartoon, the Peanups cartoon. where Lucy will hold the football for Charlie Brown to come kick. And every time she removes it at the last minute and he falls. But every time she convinces him, this time is going to be different. You know, come and kick to football, right? So you haven't heard this reference.

Now that you've mentioned it, I do remember seeing it. Well, I feel like this is what I've been doing with my audience talking about video in this podcast. For months, for months I've been telling them videos coming. basically like it'll be here tomorrow. And then there'll be some new thing I decide we need. Like I got to reconfigure the studio or I need a different camera. And then at some point, there's no more configuring to do. The studio is fine.

It's lit. There's cameras. And then it was just, I'm procrastinating on like the next steps or this or that. And I keep talking about it. I keep not doing it. Well, now you're here. You're taking this over from me. I think the football might actually get kicked.

So no one trusts me anymore on this. So I'm going to have you give the answer to the audience. We actually are going to have video pretty soon to this podcast, and for real this time, right? 100%. I think it's going to be a lot of fun because a lot of people can see shorter clips about some of the questions that you answer, some of the advice that you distill. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I've been looking forward to the video even before I got to know you and started coming to work here. So I was looking at a video the whole time.

So now it's going to become a reality. Yeah, I've had a fully equipped studio since the summer. And this gone to waste. So just here in the studio now, it's lit. We both have hair and key lights and fill lights on. There's cameras. There's a switcher. And I've just been, you know, having the best looking Zoom background in my faculty

meetings basically is all we've been getting out of this. Or I do actually, okay, in fairness, I do a lot of Zoom-based page speaking. But it's been here and there's a table that's been set up just so that we can fit two people. So good. So Jesse is actually doing this so you can trust it. I just want to do it. Not because I was mad about video. I would get stuck as soon as there is any complexity about, wait, I have to use Adobe Premiere.

Like, all right, I'm done. Wait, I have to adjust the white balance. I was like, okay, I'm out of here. It just was freezing me. You know, there's too much, there's too many technical details. It's not too hard, but man, just enough. But you know what you're doing. So I feel good about this.

Well, you talk about it all the time, like the friction involved with different projects and stuff. So I think it was just a matter of figuring out the best processes to, get the videos in place and then get them out consistently and good quality. And then that will make a good channel, a good product. People will really watch it. I think it's going to be great. So one thing Jesse talked me into is back when I was doing this myself and was worried about friction, I was thinking, you know, I'll tape a couple of questions.

And then we can have a couple of questions come out each week. And Jesse talked me into, just turn to camera on. Like, let's tape every question you do. Why not? I mean, and break them up. They can each be their own individual video. And I think the thing I'm, and deep dives, I think I'm filming the deep dives as well. The thing I like about it is that podcast is not a shareable medium.

And so it's a complaint I get from a lot of listeners that you're 35 minutes into episode 136. And there's an answer that, you know, you're like, oh, my God, my cousin needs to hear this. This is exactly his problem. What do you do? You know, I guess you could say, go and subscribe to this podcast and find this episode and go to, you know, 36 minutes in. But if you know that every question, okay, there's also just a video of me to camera answering that question, which you can just share in all the different ways.

You know, hopefully this will, that's the part I like. I think that's going to help actually make this wisdom. I'm in a, I shouldn't say wisdom. That feels pretentious. Actually, it makes these random rantings that I do in a frantic burst. We're trying to get the episodes done. accessible beyond just the people who are listening through a whole episode. So what's our timeline, Jesse?

What do you think realistically for someone actually being able to see one of these videos? As soon as possible, I think we should have some videos up. We just talked to Rob, our video guy, and he's going to, he did the okay with the first thing that I was waiting on. So now we're just going to get up and running. So we should have videos. I want to have videos every single day. And just to preview something will be cooler is Jesse and I have plans. for also as we have time filming stuff that's not just the podcast.

So he's got some cool cameras and maybe we should take suggestions or maybe we shouldn't. If you have suggestions, okay, interesting at calnewport.com, but we got a couple of cool cameras. He's got some cool equipment. We're thinking about doing some stuff around the HQ, like going to some interesting places. And, you know, as I have time, maybe filming some cool stuff on the road or outside of the studio. I think it's going to be awesome. People want to see it. People want to hear what you have to say.

people want to see you in your element walking around thinking writing stuff jiving about stuff i'm looking forward to it i do jive a lot all right so keep your eyes out for that this time for real there is actually video coming and with that let's move on and do a quick deep dive we have a quick deep dive today on yet another practical question when should tasks live on my calendar now if you've heard heard me talk about my varied productivity systems before. You know that the obligations in my life I tend to keep on task boards. I use the tool Trello. I have a different taskboard for each role in my professional life.

I have one card for each obligation. Relevant information is attached to the card. The cards are sorted under columns that dictate the status or category of that obligation. All right. And that's all fine. And I look at those when I do my weekly plan and, theory. I have admin blocks during the week where I go and look at those task boards and pull out the appropriate task and this is all good. You don't want these to exist just in your head.

That's a good place to keep them. However, there's a non-trivial fraction of my tasks that actually do not exist on that taskboard, but instead on my calendar. I use Google calendar. So typically they will exist for me on a given day as what's known as an all-day event. So it's a little event that appears just at the top of the day, not at a particular time. So the question is, what type of tasks do I put on my calendar instead of my task board? Well, to help answer this question, I have actually loaded my calendar in front of me. I did not prepare for this. I'm doing this on the fly.

I have my calendar right here in front of me. I'm going to go back in the future and back in time a little bit, and let's just look at the type of tasks I have on my calendar. All right. So, like, today I had a scheduling task. There's a medical appointment I needed to schedule. I couldn't schedule it too far in advance. And there was a note on my calendar for today to do that. And I did schedule that today. Let's see what else we have on here. Plan. Okay. So there was a change to our podcast recording planning. So at some point I knew that. the day that we were going to record that Jesse and I were going to be in the studio wasn't going to work. And I put a note on my calendar to come up with an alternative plan and talk to Jesse about it. So that was something that was on my calendar. Okay, I'm looking at real calendars here.

Posting a problem set. This was last Wednesday. Ah, the new problem set for the students in my class at Georgetown has to be posted. Check with our admin about these graduate student TA job advertisements. So, you know, I had posted this information or she was posting this information and I had put a note on my calendar to follow up with her on given information. Let's find one more here. Send slides for a speaking client. Send them slides.

All right. So what do these examples have in common? In all of these cases, there's, they are tasks. I know when they need to be executed within a several day period. Like send slides. that's the day either that they're due or I know it's the next day I have time to actually get those slides together. Follow up with our admin about those TA job posting announcements. Well, I knew when I sent all that information in that I should follow up in a week.

So it was very time specific. Let's wait a week and then follow up on what's going on. That's why that existed on that particular day. Post the problem set. That actually had to happen on that day. I post them on the specific days. It's listed on the syllabus when they're posting. so it's a reminder that this is the day that problem set is going to be posted.

I mentioned before the schedule, the podcast, schedule the podcast plan change. You know, my vague memory is that it came over the transom, the thing that was going to interrupt our schedule, but I was in the middle of a bunch of things. But I knew it was really important. So I put it on my calendar, like this is what I should do first thing Monday. And the final example I gave was scheduling this medical appointment. You could only schedule two weeks out. So I remember when I figured out, okay, I need to schedule this for the beginning of December. I went to my calendar to what's the day I'll be able to do that.

Okay, let me put the note there. So in all of these cases, these examples I just took from my real calendar of tasks that exist just on my calendar and not on my task boards, they were all things that needed to happen within a relatively specific window. Having them on the calendar, I think, is a really reasonable way of doing it because for me, like a lot of knowledge workers, The one thing I know is going to be looked at all day long is my calendar because I have a lot of appointments and meetings and talks and whatever. I got to look at my calendar or I'm just hosed. There's no way I can not look at my calendar. I could go a day or two without looking at my taskboard.

I'd be fine. If I go a day without looking at my calendar, I'm going to miss five things. And so that's not a bad place for it to be. Second, the second advantage of this is that it's well suited for weekly planning. So when it comes time to do weekly planning for a week, you look at your taskboards, you look at your. calendar, but your task boards, you know, there's lots of things on there. But when you look at your calendar, the tasks that are living on your calendar for that week have now been highlighted, underlined flashing.

These have to happen this week. When you're thinking of your weekly plan, you then integrate those things into your weekly plan. Now, you probably would see it in your taskboard when you're going to your taskboard for preparing for your weekly plan. But there's a lot of things on your task board. And you know, you might miss it that, oh, yeah, this thing really probably should happen this week. Or in some cases, you know, it could happen whenever, but you've decided I really want to get this done before the end of the month. So only put a note on a particular week. There's a psychology here where you feel better about this thing. This will get taken care of. It's time sensitive. I always look at my calendar. I do my weekly plan. I look at my calendar every day. This will not be forgotten. This will be taken care of.

To step back, there is nothing fundamental about this strategy. In other words, there's nothing that just looking at your task board at the beginning of each week. week, pulling out the things that are due that week, having a good admin check in most days. All of that on paper will take care of all of these issues, but I feel a lot better. I feel a lot better to have the stuff that is time sensitive actually live on my calendar near those times. It's a two-tier system. There's a time-sensitive task and the semi-non-time-sensitive task. They exist in different worlds.

This balance seems to work well for me. Again, I would probably be fine without the calendaring, if that's a word. Probably be fine. I do get a lot of psychological comfort knowing that that problem set that needs to be posted, that plan that needs to be changed right away and that medical appointment that has to be made, knowing that that will 100% be seen and get executed when it needs to be executed. Let's get started now with our listener calls. Our first one is about struggling with your online presence.

Hey, Kyle, I write fiction and I realize there's no marketing I can do as important. as writing the best book I can. A great book speaks for itself, but every publisher and agent I talk to tells me I need to have an online presence to market my work. Honestly, I'm not even sure I understand what a good online presence looks like for a fiction author, since there don't seem to be great models to emulate. Don't get me wrong, it seems like every author is on Twitter or other social media platforms, but they don't really talk much about their books. Most of them just talk about politics or the type of beer they like, and I can't be bothered to pay attention to them. I really don't want an online presence like that. But what does that leave me with? I realize the

power of an email list, and I'd like to have one. I was thinking that I could do book reviews in my genre, since I already read a lot of books, but do book reviews on a blog even work anymore? Or I could write about writing and creativity on a blog, but that seems like a whole other that I don't want to get involved with. I mostly just want to write the best books I can. So can you give me some guidance here? Are there great fiction authors who have an online presence I should try to emulate? How should I deal with agents and publishers who want me to be on social media?

Any advice? Thanks. Well, first of all, I would say a podcast or Twitter account in which it is a fiction writer talking about politics while drinking beers they like that, might not actually be a bad idea. So you might want to give that one a try. But assuming that doesn't work, a few things I want you to keep in mind. One, those publishers don't really mean it when they say we need you to have more of an online presence. They are desperate for deal flow. They need books to publish, books that are good, that are professional, that have a chance of catching an audience. There has to be a steady flow of these books.

So publishers are desperate for these books. Agents are desperate to have good books. to sell. If you write a compelling book, there's no editor in the world who's going to read this manuscript and say, this is a good book. This has a shot of really catching an audience. Let's go, oh, wait a second. This person doesn't have a Twitter following. We're going to pass on this deal and let, you know, Penguin publish it instead. It's not going to happen. If a book is good, they're going to want to publish it. So, yeah, if you're having casual conversation or they're trying to justify why they don't like your current manuscript, that means they're not excited about

what you're doing. It's not, we love it, and we would do it, and we would do it, and we almost pulled the trigger, but your Instagram followers weren't large enough. So I would say don't take them too seriously. Two, I think it's more important to have a well-throat through online marketing plan that's more about the platforms that exist, the accounts that exist, the shows that exist, them email newsletters that exist that you are going to take advantage of than it is you talking about what you were going to create from scratch. So you don't want to go into a book proposal and basically say,

marketing's your job. You know, I just write, leave me alone. Yeah, that's not going to fly. But if what you say is, oh, I'm going to start up a giant podcast, I'll have a huge following and that's how I'll promote my book, they know that's not going to happen either. So what you really probably want instead and what the publishers probably really want from you is to see that you have, you know, people and have established relationships with writers

that do have podcasts. And here is a newsletter here that this is the, critical one to target for the book review. And I want to go all out and getting my book reviewed on there. And I'm going to do these seven shows. These are smaller shows. I know these people are could meet them. And I'm going to use these as the stepping stone to really pitch getting on these two big shows. These are going to be at the crux of our marketing strategy. And if we could get in one of these three newsletters, that's going to be the foundation for stage one of my online push. Once stage one is done, then we can look to stage two, which is where I do X, Y, and Z. So you see what I'm saying here is you have a

very detailed and informative online marketing plan. That's not about the community you built, but your sophisticated understanding of the existing communities and how you're going to plan to leverage those to help your book be promoted. I think this is what publishers will really like to see because they don't really believe that you're going to somehow create a large presence for yourself anyways. Three, if you are going to do something time limited online, just to show them, hey, I'm doing something.

And I get this is maybe part of the fiction game that you have to have some sort of Potemkin online village you create just so you show that your game, hey, I'm willing to do whatever. What you want to do here is make sure this is not taking up too much time but maybe has some chance of attracting some sort of audience. Be incredibly specific and focused.

So if you're going to wander into this world, I'm going to have a Twitter account. I'm going to have a newsletter. God forbid I'm going to start a podcast. Be incredibly specific and focused about exactly what you were doing. One of the examples I give often is my friend Ryan Holiday and what he does on Twitter, which is very little. It's stoic quotes once a day.

And a little peek behind a curtain. Ryan is not logging on Twitter on his phone every morning, typing in one of those quotes. There is a large document of these quotes that his team actually puts out there on Twitter. but people who like Stoicism say this is great. I subscribe to this account because I like to see those quotes. That's the type of thing you should do if you're going to build one of these Potimkin online presences, is have a very specific thing you do that will be compelling to a particular niche of people and takes very little time.

So, for example, you might as a writer, and I'm going to throw out some ideas off the top of my head. I mean, if you had an online account, and I don't know what platform this would be on, but whatever, where what you're collecting is pictures of really cool writing offices, sheds and cabins by the water and cool apartments that overlook the skyline. And it's just, boom, here's a cool riding shed. Boom, here's a cool, you know, house by the water. Like, that would be really interesting. And it kind of, it's on brand.

You're a fiction writer. You like to daydream about really cool writer places. And I subscribe to your whatever this is. I don't know if it's Instagram or Twitter or a blog with an email, newsletter, which I think would probably be cooler. That's really awesome. Or if it was a podcast, it was incredibly focused. It's like 30 minutes is you and another person, and each time you're dissecting the writing habits of someone that you found online.

Like something you're already interested in. That would be really cool. Or maybe you're going to document your own self writing a novel. And it's like these check-ins and I don't know if it's on YouTube or this or that. And you film it kind of nice, but it's, you know, you're doing the work anyways. And I don't know, but just very, very specific. I know what this thing is. I'm doing one thing.

If I'm a potential consumer of your content, I know exactly what this content is. It's not you musing. It's not you just talking about the writer's life. It's not just you riffing with other people. It's not you just you're talking about beers you like and talking about politics. It's picture of a writer's shed. Picture of a writer's shed. Day 75 of me writing.

Day 76 of me writing. Or whatever it is. I'm going to read all these books and I don't know. But you get my point here. Really crystal clear. So I know exactly what I'm getting into if I subscribe. to this content. Okay, maybe do that. Choose something that's fun. You might get a bit of an audience

out of that. If you have this Potimkin Village audience that's non-trivial and a really good plan for how showing that you have a sophisticated understanding of the landscape of existing relevant online communities, you have checked that box. And so if you have any trouble going forward from there, it is not

because of the lack of online community. It's the manuscript's not where it probably needs to be to get the publishers excited. This podcast is sponsored by Four Sigma. A wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Forsygnatix mushroom coffee is real organic, fair trade, single origin, arabica coffee with Lyons main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. I like to drink this mushroom coffee right before each of my deep work.

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That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. All right, well, let's move on now to our next listener call, which has to do with things you're trying to get done outside of work. Hi, Cal, thanks for your work and your podcast. My name is Meg Wolfe. I'm an executive leadership coach, and I have my own practice, and I work with a number of partners as well. My roster is pretty full, 25 people, which is a lot. I love what I do, and I love that also there are constraints, in for deep work because when I'm sitting across from a client, I'm not context switching.

All of my attention and focus and presence is on that person, and it tends to be deep work. So my question is outside of that, I'm not getting as much done as I feel like I need to. I do have an assistant to help me with some scheduling stuff and some systems things. but in general in terms of business development and, you know, deep leisure or, you know, being a mom of a school-aged child, I just feel like I could be working 24-7 and never really ever getting to the bottom of my to-do list. I'm wondering if maybe I just need to lower my expectations. The work that I do as a coach is really draining, though, in the best way, because it's, it is deep work. and I love it.

So I'm just wondering if I need to be a little more rigorous in prioritizing that decompression time so that I can continue to do what I love and be full force with it, access all of my genius for years and years and years to come. Thanks so much for any help you can give. And thanks again for your work. Well, I'm going to recommend two things here. a combination of better systems with less work. I'm diagnosing what's going on here with limited information,

but probably what you have done, which is very standard for people who are capable and in demand, is that you kept bringing on work. So saying yes to clients until you got to a place where the pain was high enough. You said, okay, for sure, I can't bring on anymore. The problem is that's probably twice. 20% too much work. That's probably 20% too many clients.

The place where you actually want to stop taking on clients is actually at a place where you still have quite a bit of breathing room because you need that breathing room, that margin in your schedule to keep on top of this work in a way that you don't feel frenetic and that you're able to actually shut down and be shut down. So we're going to try to reduce your work. I would say reduce your clients by random number alert, but 20%. So now you freed up time. I would actually, at first, just psychologically, book time for those clients that you're no longer working with once you reduce. So if you reduce by five clients, actually book time on your schedule for five phantom clients. And now you can start actually dedicating those sessions to specific background or forward thinking quad two style work on your business. So it is sort of on your schedule.

But now instead of you sitting down with a client, is you saying this whole session with this phantom client. is all about working on my web presence or what have you. Then the first thing I mentioned is better systems. So, you know, again, go down and figure out what are the different processes I do again and again that makes up my role as an executive coach. How do I implement each of these? And you hit each of these from scratch. Because you run your own business, one of the answers to this question that you need to keep in the mix is, well, maybe I don't do this one at all. I do this, like these written reports for people or what have you, and it makes some money, but it takes a lot of time.

Maybe the way I want to implement this is just to stop doing it. So you're kind of cleaning up. Let me get down to what I'm doing. And the things that remain, you figure out, is there a better way to implement this that's going to use less of my time and attention, less context switching? My assistant can handle this completely. Let's automate this. This all happens through a form. Let's consolidate this.

There's one day, a month, where all I do is these type of invoicing. we just do it on that day and that there it's not hanging over my head and something I have to do on the fly. How do I reduce the number of messages I have to deal with in my inbox? Can we automate some of these systems or have a different place for people with inquiries to go? Trying to really reduce the cognitive footprint of the processes you have to implement and you have to do, I think it's also going to be critical here. The book I'm going to point you towards is Paul Jarvis's The Company of One. and he really talks about how in exactly your circumstance, where it's essentially a company that is built on your skill.

Your skill is valuable. You can monetize that skill. How to build a very sustainable business out of it. If your goal is not, I need to keep growing this and bring on other coaches and build a big coaching practice, and then we're going to create a bunch of online content and get really famous and then sell it for $7 million,

seven years down the line. If that's not going to be your goal, he talks about how you can instead build a very sustainable business. And you'll see he's going to tell you, you're going to pull back work, just like I was telling you, you're going to have less clients. You're going to get the confidence to charge more for the clients that actually remain. So actually your revenue doesn't change that much. You're going to take things off of your menu of offerings to simplify your life.

And the things you do, you're going to do any much more structured and controlled way. All of this is going to give you more margin. All this is going to give you the ability to do the coaching you still do very well. All this is going to give you the ability to shut down cleanly and be there for your. kids when you're not working. And so it just sounds like his book is going to be very useful here. So that's my summary. Read Paul's book.

I blurbed it so you know it's good. Do less work. Scary to hear when you run your own company, but I think you could probably ask for more money for the work you do. So not as scary as you think. And three, system, system, systems. How do I actually want to implement the processes I do to reduce the footprint? Keeping in mind that often for you, the right answer might be, maybe I should just not do

this particular process at all. All right. Let's move on now to our next call. Hi, Cal. I'm Rian. I'm a data scientist in the UK. And I'm trying to work out how you can apply techniques such as time blocking and deep work to a broader team level, especially when you've got lots and lots of projects.

And you're trying to understand, can I take on this new work or who can I allocate onto a specific project. So sort of quarterly and annual project planning. And I'm less thinking about tools because everyone's throwing different management tools at me. But what I'm interested is is the process. So what processes would you follow? Thanks. Well, it's a critical question. Because most teams do not actually try to inquire about what's on people's plates. Is it too much? is it too little who has room for something. We largely ignore that. We largely deploy, and I'm using the Royal We here to refer to knowledge work managers in general,

but we largely deploy a push-based system, which is basically push things on to people that need to be handled that you don't want on your plate, trust them to basically regulate their own workload. And maybe at some point they'll say, I don't know, I have too much and navigate that social minefield. That's largely how we actually assign work right now in knowledge work. I think it's a problem. I wrote a column about this for the New Yorker a couple months ago that was called, why do we work too much? And I really get into the problems with this push-based model. It almost inevitably leads to overwork. You basically say yes because it's socially difficult to say yes,

and it's hard to keep track of what's on your individual plate. You keep saying yes until the pain gets high enough that in frustration, you say, uncle. And the result is everyone, ends up with about 20% too much on their plate. So what you are suggesting here is a solution. Let us as a team keep track of who's working on what. So we can confront that transparently and see what the reality is. I can't push this onto your plate if I see you have a lot of things on your plate. Or if I do, I have to confront what I'm doing.

I am now putting a ridiculous amount of stuff on your plate. You know, you are putting the onus onto the team. in a way from the individual to do work allocation. I think this is a critical shift in thinking. So how do you actually do this from a process perspective? I think you can take some ideas from software development. And software development when they deploy agile type processes, they have the things that are ongoing on a card somewhere

and they can see their statuses. Okay, this thing is being worked on and here's who's working on it. And if you're using an agile methodology like Kanban, They have an explicit what's known as work-in-progress limit for each individual. They're just very clear about this. I don't want anyone working on more than two things at a time or more than one thing at a time. What's the thing that person's working on? Great.

We see it. They're working on something. When they're done, we can then figure out what to give them next. And this decision can be made transparently and with all the relevant information. Okay, you're done with this. Here's the next thing for you to work on. And you say, well, we have too many things to get done here. and it's not all getting done in time,

you have to confront the reality that you're generating too much work because here is the load, people have these slots that can be working on one or two things at a time. If you have way too many things that have to be assigned

and you can't get it to people in time, then maybe there's too much work actually going on, but you have to confront that reality. So I call this alternative that you're talking about here a pull-based approach. You're basically having the individuals

pull onto their plate the next thing they're going to work on from a large pool of potential things and this pool polling process, pulling from the pool, this is like a vocal exercise, this polling process is something that can be done

with involvement of you, with involvement of the whole team. It can be done with some foresight and intelligence. Of all the things we have that need to be done right now, what's the best thing for you to be working on next?

So it's less haphazard and more thoughtful about what people work on. So from a process perspective, that's what I would say. Separate where you're keeping track of what needs to be done, have a place for that that is common for the entire team.

Do not just distribute these things haphazardly onto people's individual plates and just ask them, how are things going? Two, have some sort of systematic way for figuring out what should this person work on next? What should that person work on next? If they have a very limited number of things on their plate at a time,

your expectations and standards for them executing those things is quite high, but as they finish, you say, okay, what comes up next? And probably what you need here is a once a day or twice a day, highly structured status meeting. We're looking at whatever tool we're using to see who's working on what and the pool of things that need to be done.

What are you working on today? What's your status? What are you committing to getting done? What do you need from other people to get that done? Great. Go rock and roll. We'll check in at the next very quick, very structured status meeting. Now you're done with that.

Why don't you work on this? What do you need to get this done? You need that from Bob and that from Allison. Great. You guys are on the call. Make sure he has that within the next 30 minutes. We'll check back in at the next status meeting. something like that. So an external tool to keep track of everything that needs to be done

and a highly structured set routine for how you figure out what someone finishes something, what comes next. That's a shift from the push method of just let's throw this stuff on people's plate through the poll method of let's figure out together. What's the next thing for you to do now that you're finished? I think these types of transitions and how we think about work is critical. You get more out of the human brain. You get a lot less burnout. It's a much better way to work. So I'm glad you asked this question. Any type of implementation along the lines I'm talking about there is going to be exponentially better than the standard thing that we do, which is, my God, I just thought of something. It stresses me out that it's on my mind. Type, type, type, type, type, type,

hey, can you handle this sin? Boom, it's off my mind. Yay. We just do that dozens and dozens of times until everyone's exhausted. So good for you for thinking about this. Hopefully those general approaches will help you make that vision of pull-not-push more concrete. All right, moving on now, we have a call about spending more quality time with your family. Hi, Cal, my name is Mark. I'm a software engineer in Michigan. I'm married with a three-year-old son. I have really good job.

They respect my time and I'm able to keep my schedule under 40 hours a week. And so I feel really good about that bucket of my life right now and the progress I've made in becoming a better employee. and what I want is more quality time with my family. Like a lot of adults, I struggle with the balance of family against all the other demands in my life. I've got a good amount of weight to lose, so I need a non-trivial amount of time for fitness. A lot of household administration that comes up, and then kind of separately, household projects that I end up being responsible for. And so family ends up feeling like just another chore.

You look for inspiration on this, and you get the social media version. that portrays an unrealistic vision for family. So if in my professional life I've become good at reflecting on how I work to become a better employee, how might I do the same thing for my family life so that way I can improve how I approach being a father and a husband? Be curious some of the things that you do here or if there's anyone that you respect on this subject. Thank you. Well, look, I'm pretty careful to have my household manager tell my nanny the bring my kids into my presence at least once a day for five minutes so that I can say,

how was your day today? And they say, yes, Papa, we had a good day. And then I give a subtle nod to my nanny. And they bring the kids out and the household manager make sure I don't have to see them again for 24 hours. So that's what I would advise. Just make sure your staff brings your kids into your presence for a few minutes every day. By the way, there's people out there that somehow assume for whatever reason that somehow my life is like this where basically I just never see my kids and there's some sort of giant staff that takes care of them for me. So not everyone's going to get that joke. Okay, so a couple recommendations here. One good shutdown complete ritual.

So even if you are physically in the presence of your family, if your mind is psychologically on work, this email I have to send this meeting that's coming up. this thing that I maybe not making much progress on. They're only getting a small bit of the benefit. So definitely lean into your shutdown ritual. Then make sure you're closing all the open loops. You have a good plan for the next day. That plan fits into a weekly plan. You can trust it.

You're not missing anything. You check that shutdown box and your time block planner or say a phrase like schedule shutdown complete so that your brain can actually release work. I think that's really important. to see if there's ways you can reduce the footprint of logistical or administrative, non-family-oriented time-consuming work in your life. So the whole point of working, not the whole point, but a large point of working is to get money in exchange for your time, that that money can then be invested to get outcomes

that are useful for you. So it sounds like you're good at your job. You have a good job. It's probably a well-paying job based on what I can tell from your question. Don't be shy about saying I want to invest a non-trivial amount of the money generated in this job

to actually free up my time outside of the job. I think sometimes we get in this mindset of if I don't have to spend money on X, then I won't. Like you have beat the system. But if you have the money to spend and it's going to free up time,

then maybe you should actually consider doing that if that is possible. And you might have to really readjust your readjust your budget. We're going to do less of this so that we can get more time to do that. Someone who's written well about this is my friend Laura Vandercam and she has a book called 168 hours. I always get numbers wrong when I do this, but I think it's 168 or 162, 100-something hours.

But anyways, it's about productivity and in particular the intersection between household admin and productivity. And she's a big advocate of, hey, if you can afford it. spend money to take things off your plate. That's kind of the point of money, right? That if you happen to have it, that's a pretty good thing to use it on. You could buy a nicer car or a, you know, whatever, a lot of unnecessary exercise equipment, or you might be able to get a yard crew so that you don't have to rake your leaves and

weed for three hours on the weekend because you have a young kid and that's not really what you want to be doing. So you want to reduce that time. I mean, I'm kind of looking towards Jesse because he knows more about fitness than I do, but I'm not sure if I agree with this idea that if your goal is you need to lose weight, you're talking about that being a substantial time involving activity. I mean, 80% of that is probably getting your diet in order. And do I have that more or less right?

Like, you've got to lock in your diet. That doesn't take any, it doesn't take any more time to eat clean than it does to eat junk. And honestly, when it comes to weight, I mean, you're not going to go peloton off. If you're a guy that has the extra 20 pounds, the way that's going to go away is you're going to stop eating so much sugar and you're going to stop drinking so much beer. And so, you know, maybe you need to go through a phase where you're really focused on your healthy eating and you have some sort of less time consuming, you know, trade intensity for time type of exercise.

I mean, I do this. And Jesse might shake his head here because he knows much more about fitness than I do. My time saving hack with fitness, especially when I had young kids is I said, okay, I can't get to a gym necessarily. I can't do long exercising. So what I did is I said, I'm going to do a thousand pull-up. a month at a minimum and some months are shorter than other so I just do 36 pull-ups every day. It is really intense, but it only takes four minutes, especially once you get good at it, right?

And it at least keeps your muscles moving or what have you and active and so they don't atrophy. I mean, honestly, if you had to do that for a year, you know, a thousand pull-ups a month, a thousand push-ups a month and you're eating well, you're probably going to be better off than the 90 minutes you're doing in the gym twice a week right now. And then as your kids get older, you can actually go figure out how to do the stuff that you probably should be doing with weights, etc. I don't know how that works. But all right, so I'm just throwing that out there as well.

All right. So we want to summarize here, good shutdown routine. Two, invest money where you can so that you have more time outside of work, taking things off your plate, taking things off your family's plate. And three, you talked about this social media fantasy about what parenting life should be. I've seen some of these accounts. As far as I can tell, parenting life is, if you're a woman,

is all about you and your kids are wearing white linen and are in fields. So according to Instagram, it's like what moms are supposed to do is be in fields with their kids and there's flowers and they're wearing white linen

and they're very well lit and they're usually doing some sort of project like we're pressing flowers between tissue paper to make a a set of wind chimes with which we can celebrate Mother Gaia. And I also have a kind of a nice glow behind because I take the picture. All right, we all know the reality is within seven seconds.

The one kid will be eating the tissue paper while the other one is using the pressed flour to see if they can blind their sister by getting it ground up and blown into their eyes and somehow you have urine on your white linen dress because that's just how that goes down. And if you're a man, as far as I can tell from the social media things, you basically are supposed to be, as far as I can tell, either a professional athletic coach who is, you know, training the next Olympic athlete out of their kids, or you have a full-fledged movie caliber special effects laboratory and maker shop in which you are building life-size robotic mecks that you can ride in and your kids can move around in and they're controlled, remote-controlled, and you're videotaping it. it with professional level filming and these are these fun projects that you're doing with your kids. All this is impossible. No one actually really does all this, right?

So ignore social media. It's better to have to be around. Hey, you're just around. We're having dinner together. I'm around. You know. And then having something you do with each of your kids. And it might not be every day, but it might be, I'm helping this kid with baseball.

So once a week, I pick him up from the bus and we go by the playground and we play some baseball. This other kid we're into risk. My oldest right now is really into risk. We play a lot. We play some risk and that's just what we do and it's not every day but we play risk or whatever. You have a thing you're doing with their kids that you can, your kids can think like, dad does this with me. Even if it's just once a week, right? That's kind of where you need to be. And you're around and you're not lost. And you're around and not, you know, with the leaf blower till 9 p.m. because you didn't want to spend the 100 bucks to have someone come

to your yard. All of these things work together. and I think you'll be much better off. I think we have time for one last call. This one is about leveraging career capital. Hi, Cal, this is Drake here. First, I'd like to say I'm a big fan of your work and your books have helped me greatly. I wanted to ask a question regarding career capital.

I've just finished my undergraduate studies and I'm looking to start my career. I've graduated with two degrees with a strong GPA and have done several research opportunities. In other words, I believe I have accrued a lot of career capital. How can I leverage what I've done in my studies as a student as career capital in order to start a satisfying career? Well, at your current age, the career capital that you have is basically relevant to unlocking particular jobs. So you have where you went to school, what you study, and what your grades are.

For a lot of jobs, that's an important piece of career capital required to unlock that job, that you need good enough grades and a good enough program at a good enough school to even be interviewed for the job. This is basically the main investment you can do with capital you have acquired as a student, which is to say there's not a ton you can do with it yet. So it opens up more opportunities. That's great. So pick one. And it should be an opportunity as we talk about a lot on the show that is of interest.

to you and more importantly, you see that as you, if and when you get better at this particular position, it will open up options in the future that really appeal to you, that you will have good opportunities in the future if and when you acquire career capital ongoing to make interesting investment. So if you're looking at becoming a lawyer at a big city firm, you actually maybe are going to have a limited number of options for actually investing career capital as you build it up, because that's a particular job in which the only thing you can really get in exchange for your career capital is more money, but you're actually very constrained about

what your working life looks like as compared to, let's say, an entrepreneurial pursuit where if you build up a lot of career capital there, you have huge number of options of what you want to do with your life, what you want your life to be like, et cetera. So right now you're at the very beginning. You have good grades, good. You have good degrees, good. That opens up options. Choose an option. Now you're kind of starting over. The collections, capital have been cleared. And you need to start building the career capital specifically in that position with an eye towards investing it, metaphorically speaking down the line to make your working life

veer towards what resonates and away from what doesn't. So how do you do that? Well, when you have a new job, I usually come back and saying there's a couple things that are important right off the bat. Number one, perhaps most of all, be dependable. When you say you're going to do something, you do it. When someone gives you something, it gets done. If you're not going to get it done, when you say you're going to get it done, you let people know,

hey, I know I said I'd have this done by Wednesday. It's taking longer than I thought. It's going to be Friday morning. And then you get it to them in that new time you said you're going to do it. You be the person that people trust. They're organized. They have their act together. They finish stuff.

They say they're going to finish. That sounds basic, but it's one of the most important distinguishing things you can do in the first year or two of a new job. That is the foundation on which you're going to build the fastest possible path to a lot more career capital. acquisition. Number two, do the work you do at a high level of quality. All right? So I say I'm going to get this done. I'm going to get it done. I'm not just going to do it. I'm going to do it really well. The people who give me something to do are not going to worry. Is this fine? Do I have to go over it? Maybe it's not really going to be what I want. They trust it when you do something that's going to be done really well. Now, this may take more time, but because

of thing number one, you know how to get more time because you were very organized and things don't drop through the cracks. So you know now to say, instead of I'll get this done later today, you say I'll have it done in two days because you know it's going to take more time or you know you have three other things on your plate and this is going to have to slot in. So you can give them realistic assessments

and when it's going to get done and give yourself enough time to do it really well. You do those two things. You're dependable and you deliver with quality. You do those two things for one to two years, one to two years and almost any knowledge work style job and the career capital is going to start being shoveled into your metaphorical bank volunteer.

options are going to open up. You're going to get moved up the chain really quickly. People are going to want you on their teams. You're going to get put in charge of more interesting projects, bigger stake projects. You're going to take bigger swings for the company. All sorts of great things are going to happen. They're going to allow you in about six or seven years to have a lot of autonomy of your career, make some investments and make your career something that's really cool.

But in the first one or two years, that's how you get that whole path started. So what's going to support all of that, make that possible? You got to care about productivity. You got to care about it. You got to be organized. Where does information go? How do I keep track of it? What am I doing this week?

How does that fit into my plan for this quarter? What am I doing today? Am I time block planning? They're full capture going on in a shutdown routine. All of the different types of things I talk about here for organizing what's on your plate and making the most use of the time you have. If you can master that, that will enable you to then be dependable. That will enable you to then deliver with quality. And that will enable almost everything else good to comes.

So I know it's not exciting. what you have facing you for the next year or two. But it's really important. It is a time for geeking out about how you handle the mechanics of actually adding value to information, the basic function of knowledge work, geek out on productivity, have your act together, be dependable, do quality. That's going to lead to cool places. And then all you have to do is remember that as that capital accrues, as it eventually will,

that it does you no good unless you actually invest it. And so you have to have a good vision of what you want in your life, what resonates, what doesn't, what lifestyle appeals, what lifestyle doesn't. So that when you actually have some leverage, you can apply that leverage in a very intentional direction. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for this episode. If you want to submit your own listener calls, go to calnewport.com slash podcast for Instructions How. Be back on Monday with the next regular episode of the Deep Questions Podcast. and until then, as always, stay deep.